General
Clinton Bailey, American-Israeli Who Preserved Bedouin Culture, Dies at 88
Armed with a camera and tape recorder, he spent decades documenting the ancient traditions of nomadic Bedouin tribes, creating a record of a vanishing culture.
Clinton Bailey, an American-Israeli academic whose research and documentation of the ancient traditions of the nomadic Bedouin tribes of the Middle East helped preserve a vanishing culture for posterity, died on Jan. 5 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 88.
The cause was heart failure, his son Michael said.
A native of Buffalo, Dr. Bailey spent some 50 years recording the oral poetry, negotiations, trials, wisdom of the elders, weddings, rituals, proverbs and stories of the tribes of the southern Israeli Negev Desert and the Sinai Peninsula. Traveling by Jeep to desert Bedouin encampments, sometimes joining their migrations for weeks on camel back, camera and tape recorder in hand, he created a record of a largely unwritten culture.
The task was urgent, he said, because Bedouin society, then largely illiterate, was on the cusp of rapid change. Modern borders, government restrictions and urbanization were beginning to encroach on their nomadic ways, and the advent of transistor radios, cars and mobile phones was sending the modern world swooshing in.
“I decided to try to capture that culture,” Dr. Bailey said in an interview in 2021 marking the donation of his archive of 350 hours of audio tape and a trove of prints and slides to the National Library of Israel. “I could already see it was beginning to disappear.”
The library described his collection in a statement as “a treasure of orally transmitted ancient culture, now irreplaceable, and not available via the younger generations of Bedouin who grew up exposed to modernity.”
